Discovery Of Fossilized Human Footprints In An Ancient Lakebed

Live Science

Researchers have discovered fossil human footprints embedded in an ancient lakebed that show humans inhabited North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, in what is now New Mexico.  Credit: National Park Service, USGS and Bournemouth University

Transcript

00:00An international team of researchers have been working at the White Sands National Park

00:07in New Mexico to determine the age of the footprint traces that occur so abundantly

00:12there.

00:13The human footprints are associated with Pleistocene megafauna and are found on the margins and

00:18bed of what was a lake.

00:21David Bustos, resources manager at the park, explains.

00:25For years we've been seeing really incredible fossil footprints of mammoth and people and

00:30camels and giant ground sloth, all kinds of incredible megafauna alongside human prints

00:37throughout the park at different elevations.

00:41Sometimes the prints have been made of clay, sometimes made of dolomite, sometimes they

00:44were in a sandy material.

00:46For years we've been wondering how old are these human prints, are they as old as the

00:50megafauna?

00:52To address the age of the footprint traces, a new excavation was made in January 2020

00:58to reveal the stratigraphic context of the footprint layers.

01:01Kathleen Springer, working with Jeff Pigatti, both of the US Geological Survey, undertook

01:07the dating, as described by Kathleen.

01:10Our work involved a detailed stratigraphic analysis of the individual layers of this

01:16ancient lake that the human footprints are found in, and then dating the abundant seeds

01:22that occur on all of these horizons with radiocarbon.

01:26The significance of the site and work is outlined by Vance Holliday from the University of Arizona.

01:32It is now the oldest well-documented archaeological site in the Americas, with evidence of human

01:38activity from about 23,000 to 21,000 years ago.

01:43That was during the last ice age in New Mexico.

01:47I'm Dan Otis from the National Park Service.

01:50This discovery is important because it confirms that humans were in North America much earlier

01:54than many people believe.

01:57Unlike other sites where people disagree about whether broken stones and bones are products

02:01of human action, or they worry that younger artifacts might somehow have been introduced

02:06into older deposits, what we have at White Sands National Park are stratified layers

02:11containing indisputably human tracks alongside those of extinct ice age mammals.

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